The supercommittee asked for a few good deficit-cutting ideas from around Washington. Here’s what it got: tens of thousands of recommendations that were culled from the legislative recycling bin, cloaked in fresh wrapping paper and regifted.

Washington, perhaps not surprisingly, is the wrong place to shop for fresh policy ideas.

Rather than taking the legislative all-star team’s offer to make recommendations as an opportunity to offer big new ideas to solve a big problem, think tanks, congressional committees and outside interest groups read it as a good time to pull the leftovers off the shelf.

Not terribly original but also not necessarily a bad approach, according to congressional experts.

“Look, their time is short,” said North Dakota Sen. Kent Conrad, chairman of the Budget Committee. “They’ve got to borrow heavily from work others have done.”

Eric Ueland, a Duberstein Group lobbyist who was former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist’s chief of staff, contends that it would be hard to get Congress — and the president — to sign off on public policy prescriptions that hadn’t been vetted by the political process.

“A completely brand-new set of policies might be an impediment to the supercommittee’s recommendations making it across the legislative finish line,” Ueland said.

Still, the tendency to promote shopworn proposals — like a student repurposing a top-grade term paper for another class — is overwhelming.

David Addington, former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney and a vice president at The Heritage Foundation, submitted the conservative think tank’s treatise, “Saving the American Dream,” to the supercommittee. Its contents track closely with the budget offered by the Republican Study Committee — a plan that garnered the votes of just 119 Republicans and no Democrats.

Perhaps portentously, the fine print of the proposal advises that “nothing written here is to be construed … as an attempt to aid or hinder the passage of any bill before Congress.”

The left is playing the same game: The Center for American Progress’s Idea of the Day for Sept. 29 was to include comprehensive immigration reform in the supercommittee’s final product.

Most of the congressional committees that bothered to make formal recommendations either asked the supercommittee not to cut programs in their jurisdiction or offered up existing bills.

There are exceptions: Republicans and Democrats on the House and Senate Agriculture committees are trying to avoid deeper cuts to favored programs with a plan that would replace existing subsidies with new ones, as The New York Times recently reported.

Norm Ornstein, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, said there’s plenty of mental muscle being strained on reforming the Tax Code.

“You have a bunch of creative ideas for instituting a consumption tax that either retain or expand progressivity,” Ornstein said, citing Cornell economist Robert Frank’s work and the Competitive Tax Plan devised by Yale’s Michael Graetz.

“If we want to get off the consumption treadmill, we must alter the incentives that have led us to spend so much in the first place,” Frank wrote in The Washington Post. “We can do this in a powerful yet unintrusive way by scrapping our current income tax in favor of a more steeply progressive consumption tax. Such a tax would be straightforward to administer: Each family would pay tax not on its income but on its total spending — as measured by the simple difference between its annual income and its annual savings.”

But even those outside-the-Beltway ideas have had a chance to simmer. Frank’s piece was written in 1999, and Graetz’s plan dates back several years.

Besides, all indications are that any comprehensive overhaul of the nation’s tax system wouldn’t be undertaken by the supercommittee. Instead, lawmakers and aides say, the supercommittee could kick those decisions back to legislative committees such as House Ways and Means, Senate Finance, and House Energy and Commerce that have jurisdiction over tax and entitlement laws.

Veterans of the policy process suggest that the supercommittee’s design negates the possibility of putting together fresh material. Several members of the panel served on earlier deficit-reduction panels, and the group has made clear it’s giving heavy consideration to proposals developed in the past year by the Simpson-Bowles Commission, the Gang of Six and the Biden Group. And, of course, Congress didn’t give its committee-on-steroids enough time to weigh the political and policy benefits and risks of new policy proposals, much less whether and by how much they would reduce annual deficits or the nation’s long-term debt.

“The key point is that with these well-worn proposals, everyone knows where the land mines are and [the Congressional Budget Office] has had a chance to look at them. CBO would be hard-pressed to produce brand-new estimates in the middle of the supercommittee’s deliberations,” said David Kendall, a senior fellow at the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way. “That’s why it’s important to pull out proposals that have been circulated already.”